Hope Rises For Cancer Patients As Drug Passes First Test

People with untreatable cancers now have hope if a new drug that will help their immune   attack their own tumours passes final test.
The drug according to reports is still at experimental stage and involves only 16 patients.
The new cancer breakthrough but has been called a “leap forward” and a “powerful” demonstration of the potential of such technology.
Each person had a treatment developed just for them, which targeted the specific weak spots in their tumour.
Reports says it’s too early to fully assess the therapy’s effectiveness and it is expensive and time-consuming.
The work focuses on a part of the immune system called T-cells, which patrol the body and inspect other cells for problems.
The drug uses proteins – called receptors – to effectively sniff out signs of infection or deviant cells that have become cancerous.
Cancers can be tricky for T-cells to spot. A virus is distinctly different to the human body, but cancers are more subtle because they are a corrupted version of our own cells.
The idea of the therapy is to boost levels of these cancer-spotting T-cells. It has to be tailored to each patient as each tumour is unique.
The researchers scoured patient’s blood for rare T-cells that already had receptors which could sniff out their cancer and after then harvested other T-cells that could not find the cancer and redesigned them.
Original receptors, which may find other problems or infections, were replaced with those from the cancer-searching T-cell.
With efficacy the drug help modified T-cells  then put back into the patient to seek out the tumour
Transforming T-cells into a form that can hunt cancer requires considerable genetic manipulation to both remove the genetic instructions for building their old receptors, and give them the instructions for the new ones.
The drug was made possible by tremendous advances in the gene-editing technology Crispr, which acts like a pair of molecular scissors – allowing scientists to easily manipulate DNA. The researchers who developed Crispr won which the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020.